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“No, I don’t,” I said flatly. He was right—there was a story. But they didn’t need to know how I’d watched my best friend, T.J., die, and how one of the things that kept me going was believing he was still watching over me. Still, I wasn’t convinced any disembodied spirit would obligingly stamp an imprint on something as mundane as the light and sound of a camera or microphone.
Gary intervened. “We could talk more about this over dinner. You know a good place to eat?”
I couldn’t have hoped for a better opening. “As a matter of fact, I do.”
Of course I took the gang to New Moon.
A semiprivate dining room in back gave us a little quiet.
“Why Denver?” I asked, while the staff brought out glasses of soda and water.
Gary said, “I’m hoping the show lasts long enough that we get to every major city eventually. Apart from that, Denver’s got some good stories. Some classic hauntings are here.”
“Have you found anything good yet?” I said.
“The Brown Palace,” Gary said.
Tina leaned forward. “There’s this story about a ghostly waiter in an old-fashioned uniform leaving the service elevator. We did a bunch of readings there. The EMF numbers were through the roof—”
“The trouble is,” Jules said, “it’s an elevator. Of course there’s going to be increased electrical activity.”
Tina continued, undaunted. “We got a recording of a baby crying. There’s been reports of a ghostly baby crying for years—”
“But we checked the guest register and there was a baby staying in the hotel that night. The sound could have carried,” Jules said.
Gary shrugged. “This is how it goes. As long as there’s a plausible, mundane explanation, we can’t call our findings conclusive.”
I said, “How do you deal with skeptics? When things like ghost photography have been pretty much debunked—”
Gary gathered himself, lacing his fingers on the table in front of him and taking a breath in preparation for a long speech. Tina rolled her eyes, like she’d heard this a thousand times. Jules smirked.
“There’s the supernatural, then there’s really the supernatural. There’s proof, then there’s proof. Once you’ve explained, discounted, and debunked every piece of evidence you possibly can—there’s still something there. Something that can’t be explained. That’s what we do. We go in, try to explain away everything about these phenomena we possibly can. Then we look at what’s left. That’s as close to proof as we’ll get. We’re scientists, not spiritualists.”
“‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth,’” I quoted Arthur Conan Doyle.
“Sherlock Holmes. That’s right,” Gary said.
“You know Arthur Conan Doyle believed in fairies? He didn’t think it was possible for a couple of little girls to fool everyone with a cheap camera and paper cutouts.”
“You know the other side of that story, right?” said Jules. His British accent was regional, distinctive. From somewhere in London, maybe. “That the girls really saw fairies. They just couldn’t get anyone to believe them until they did up those photos. Funny, isn’t it?”
“You can ask for proof all you want,” Gary said. “But can you trust it once you have it? That’s the tough part. Especially where the paranormal is concerned. So much of it is taken on someone’s word.”
“At least until the day we can get a ghost to sit in front of the camera for an interview,” Tina said. They all made noises, huffs and groans, like this was a long-running joke. In fact, I remembered a scene on a past show: Tina pointin
g the camera at empty space, asking silly questions, And what made you decide to become a ghost? How’s the food? Any word from Elvis?
I decided the Paradox PI guys weren’t just the stars of a TV show—they were in earnest about their work, and I could take them seriously. We were on the same page, and I wanted to get them on my show more than ever.
“How’d you all get interested in this? Ghost hunting, paranormal investigation, whatever.”
Gary, it turned out, lost his brother when he was young. Since then, he’d been searching for some kind of hope, some evidence, that his life hadn’t simply ended. If I recalled correctly, Arthur Conan Doyle became obsessed with the paranormal when he lost his son. The same story playing out. Conan Doyle had turned to mediums and séances. Gary turned to science. Tina told a story of a ghostly encounter when she was a little girl, a young woman in antique clothing appearing in the attic of their old New England house. She was a believer through and through, but Gary’s methods appealed to her more than those of the table-rapping set.
“That, and I like trying to scare people,” she added with a grin. “It’s amazing: Someone can be the most hard-nosed skeptic in the world, but you tell them something’s definitely there, you can actually watch their hair turn white. It’s awesome.”
“Jules has the real credentials here,” Gary said. “He’s a fifth-generation member of the SPR—”
“Which is—”
